Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  All this was simple enough: these girls were unillusioned about the trade they were plying, and it was nothing more than a trade, usually of body for money. Yet all too often, the young ladies of the night were not so conveniently transparent: many, in fact, seemed not to be counterfeiting, so much as enjoying—for profit—a kind of frolicsome high spirits that actually came naturally. Their lust for lucre was real, but so too was their charm.

  Take Nitya, for example, a lovely round-faced minx with hair that fell to her waist and a smile that could stop hearts from beating. That she could support herself just by drinking in the glamour of the big city was such a delight to her that she could not help but chatter uncontrollably. Her English boyfriend, who lived in Saudi Arabia, had been visiting her, she told me, for four years now. He sometimes sent her money and he always brought her presents. “Once,” she said, eyes alight with pleasure, “I say I want video machine.” And? “My boyfriend give me it. Otherwise I angry.” Wasn’t that a little conniving? “Why?” She pouted. “Some man give girl house. Five hundred thousand baht [$20,000]. Video only fifteen thousand baht [$600]. No problem.”

  A happy incarnation of the imp perverse, Nitya was jubilant at the effects of her appeal, and her appeal was only kindled by her jubilation. Sure, she admitted, she often got her sister to write her letters to her boyfriend. But she knew that he loved her, or needed her, much too much to abandon her. Once he had flown all the way to Bangkok only to find her in a hospital delivering an Arab-featured baby. “He cry, he very angry,” she recalled, in the excitable staccato of bar-girl English. “But he cannot go.” Once he had visited and found that her passport was filled with recent stamps from Denmark, Sweden and Germany. “He sad. He ask me why I hurt him,” she cheerily reported. “What can I say? I was wrong.” He walked out on her. But pretty soon he came back, as she knew he would. In any case, she assured me, she was always kind to her boyfriend when he visited, and she still wrote letters to his seventy-year-old mother in Glamorgan. “No problem,” bubbled Nitya exultantly. “No problem.”

  Indeed, for every girl who opened herself up like a cash register, there seemed to be forty others who had about them more curious purity than seemed good or right. These were not the dull-eyed whores or jaded trollops of street corners, but coltish, puckish young kids, blessed often with a friendly, fresh-blown sweetness, sensual but not too far from innocence. And though they might be hardheaded, hardhearted they usually were not. Some, to be sure, were human calculators, some were blazing-eyed tigresses, all were polished charmers. But many, at heart, seemed nothing more than mischievous schoolgirls. When their favorite song came on, they could not help jumping up, singing along and dancing with their friends. And most of the rest of the time, they were to be found in a slumber-party mood, holding hands together, swapping stories about boyfriends, playing children’s dice games or chattering on about Mamá and Papá. Many were country girls more pious in their Buddhism than the city’s sophisticates, and many brought an uncomplicated zest even to the rigors of the job: one girl showed me the book that she had studied every day for a year in order to learn English, another told me that she had spent three months paying $10 an hour for Japanese lessons after learning that yen flowed more freely than dollars or Deutschemark.

  So even as they went about their very adult trade, the girls who worked in the bars seemed little in more ways than the physical: hard and easily hurt, they were just experienced enough to know how to turn their innocence to advantage. Their sauciness was shy, their bashfulness was brazen. One minute, they would stroke a foreigner’s hand to gauge what kind of job he had; the next in order to show him real affection. One minute, they were repeating endearments imperfectly picked up from some American movie; the next, forgetting themselves, they would admit to daydreaming about the right man or a fairy-tale future. They loved the Star Wars movies, many of them confessed, but their all-time favorites were Rocky and Flashdance. Because they showed that dreams come true.

  INEVITABLY, THIS ELFIN wish for happy endings rubbed constantly against the details of the lives they led. Nearly every girl had a tale to tell, and nearly always it was the same one. She grew up in a village in a family of twelve. A local man came along when she was in her early teens and promised to make her rich (“Thai men no good”). He said she would make her fortune, but she ended up making his. He said she would be “a maid,” then forced her to become a slave. She bore him a child, she returned alone to her village, she worked without joy or profit in the fields. Now she could support her offspring only by coming to Bangkok. Who looked after the child? “Mamá.” Did her still devoted parents know what she was doing in Bangkok? “No. I tell them I work in boutique. They know I work in bar, they kill me.” Sometimes there were hazards in her job: a boss would force her to sleep with him, or lock up the bar and screen blue movies. But she could always find another opening, another show. In the countryside, she could earn only $15 a month; here she took home thirty times as much, leaving her more than enough to send $100 each month to her little brother or her widowed mother.

  One day, she hoped, she could make enough money to return to her village and raise her child (though, schoolgirl to the end, she squandered her cash as soon as she got it on discos and flashy clothes). And one day, she hoped, she would fly off to live with her husband. After the wedding, he had been forced to return to Australia, or California, or Holland. But he promised, he really promised, to send her a visa. The plane ticket, he wrote, was in the mail.

  Sometimes, there were variations on the standard theme: Somchai had been bustled out of Phnom Penh by her uncle as soon as the town was stormed by the Khmer Rouge and had landed up in Bangkok, penniless, uneducated and unqualified; Vaitnee had been studying at a local university when Papá died, forcing her to drop out to support Mamá. And some of the tales might have been fact, and some of them fiction—in the half-light of the bar, who could tell?—but it was hard not to shiver, just a little, when Somchai said that she was frightened of sleeping alone because ghosts from Cambodia came back to her in the night; or when Vaitnee admitted that her favorite night of the month was the night she returned to Mamá, and was lullabied to sleep as if she were once more a little girl.

  Together with their anthology of sad stories, all the girls cherished, as souvenirs, their albums of photographs. These were invariably small and tatty things, their plastic covers adorned with pictures of a smiling kitten, or a cartoon bee. Inside was a heartbreaking gallery of treasured moments: Pen, for example, in a hundred places with a thousand men, her face always smiling, her eyes sometimes red in the flashlight glare. Usually, she was dressed in a bikini, or simply a pajama shirt, and her companion was fully clothed; sometimes she was nestled in the lap of a shirtless Westerner, sometimes her hand was draped around him. In most cases, they were sitting in a bedroom or a bar. “This man from Switzerland,” she explained. “This me in Phuket. This outside bar. This very good man. He give me kangaroo bag. This,” she said proudly, pointing to a portly, disheveled character in his late forties, “my boyfriend.”

  Their other most precious mementos were the letters or postcards they received (translated for $2 a shot, and sometimes answered too, in the great tradition of Samuel Richardson, by a man who hung around the entrance to the Grace Hotel). These too recited the formulae of uncertain affection as ritually as thank-you notes. “I still think of the time we spent together,” they always said. “I hope I will see you again soon,” they usually continued. “I love you,” they invariably concluded. A Pakistani sent a greeting card showing two blond lovers in a California sunset. Bart from Holland wrote, “I love your mind, your body. You are all that I want in a woman.” A firm in New Jersey replied, in Xeroxed typescript, “We are sorry to inform you that Mr. David Jackson, to whom you wrote, is no longer employed by this company. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

  ONE AFTERNOON JANJIRA invited me to see her room. Down a dingy alleyway we went, and up some narrow
stairs. She turned a key and let me into a tiny, ill-lit cell, bare except for a mattress and some bedding on the floor (the mattress for her, she explained, the sheets for her roommate—a loquacious, lipsticked transvestite from Laos). A stale loaf of bread sat on a small table; underneath was a bowl of old water. Mickey Mouse grinned down from the bathroom. On a shelf above the mattress, Janjira kept her most valuable possessions: a savings account book and a crumpled manila envelope stuffed with letters. She didn’t sleep here very often, she said by way of apology.

  Two pieces of decoration dominated the place. Above the mattress was a two-by-one-foot framed glossy photo of Janjira completely naked, with the hands of a clock attached to the glass. Her face was her fortune, I knew, and her picture, she implied, was her résumé. The only other furnishings were two three-foot-tall stuffed animals, with cartoony faces and silly smiles, suspended from the ceiling. Why keep these? I asked. She turned a little bashful. Sometimes, she said, she took them down and slept with them in her arms, one on either side of her. “I dream I have one little girl,” she said. “And also one little boy.”

  Yet the system had little room for such indulgences. What it promised was something more then sex, but a good deal less than security. The girls were to offer love for a price; the men to return it for a while. Both parties were to swear eternal love for a week, or maybe a month. Constancy, like everything else, could be imagined into existence. But let affection or desperation or yearning intrude, even for a moment, and you were lost. Bangkok was home to what was truly the oldest profession in the world: of love, where there was only uncertainty.

  I first met Ead in the corner of a bar, dressed in a housewife’s buttoned-down frock and white sneakers that looked like a pixie’s playthings, gravely keeping to herself. I was surprised to find a shrinking violet in this place of wildly blooming orchids. And doubly surprised when Ead, as we began to talk, swallowed a couple of pills. For what? “The doctor say I think too much.” Of what? Sometimes of her seven-year-old daughter, sometimes of her present calling.

  As Ead went on speaking, it became clear that her sorrow lay in an intelligence that could not easily accept the paradoxes of her life: unless she gave herself, she knew, she could not enjoy herself; but unless she kept something of herself to herself, she could not survive. Worse than that, she was still old-fashioned enough to chafe against the moral complexities of her position: unable to respect herself, she found it hard to trust herself. So, like many of her colleagues, she kept on reminding me of all her acts of charity, as if to remind herself. Once she gave her boss $1,000, she said. Again and again she reiterated that she had slept with only seven men in thirteen months. Two men had proposed to her. Another had said he would fly her to Hong Kong. A fourth had promised to open a bar just for her. “But,” she said, eyes shining, “I no have good luck.”

  To me, it sounded as if she had all the luck in the world. But as she continued, I began to see that she—like any girl who could not happily give herself over to pleasure or profit—was entangled as fatally in the cat-and-mouse game as the men she attracted. These girls were looking for love in all the wrong places, receiving every proposal except the one they might be tempted to accept. For the men they encountered in bars were generally sweet-talkers, lonely transients, “butterflies” who flitted every night from one flower to the next. So Ead had to remember not to forget herself, had to force herself not to believe the compliments she heard. If her self-respect depended on accepting praise, her sense of self-protection bet he said that to all the girls.

  For the sensitive bar girl, then, there was only one thing worse than attaching herself to a man she despised, and that was finding a man she really did care for. Ead’s Swiss boyfriend had told her she meant everything to him and they had spent three weeks together. She never heard from him again. For six weeks she had gone everywhere with her Australian boyfriend, who had said they should get married. But now he was back in Sydney, and she did not know when or whether he would return, whether he would ever send for her, whether he was back with a girlfriend or a wife. She had thought about spending $500 to fly to Australia, just so she could be sure. In the meantime, in a mood of self-mutilation, Ead had cut off her long hair. “I think,” she said simply, “I have broken heart.”

  VI

  Such quicksand compacts were by no means peculiar to Thailand, of course. I had already met Phuong from Vietnam in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. And as I chugged upriver to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, one bright autumn morning, I opened Greene’s The Honorary Consul to find the Bangkok bar girl incarnated once again, down to the last jot and tittle, by Clara from Argentina. Here was the same sad taste in clothes, the same unhardened girlishness, the same easiness with deceit, the same ability to set off a hundred emotional guessing games—in short, the same centaurlike creature, half hooker and half ingenue, who saw nothing wrong with marrying a nice man while carrying on with a client.

  And there she was again, the elusive meretrix, in Japanese Mariko, the obsessive focus of John David Morley’s Pictures from the Water Trade, and there once more bodied forth unforgettably by half-Malayan Teena Chang, the girl at the heart of Paul Scott’s The Chinese Love-Pavilion who drives her lover mad, even after her death, with her teasing duplicities. In Manila too, courtesans become consorts in almost exactly the same fashion.

  Yet between those two scenes was a world of difference. For in seedy and improvident Manila, the bars were the fast-buck stuff of a puritan’s nightmare; while in high-tech and prosperous Bangkok, they were quicksilver riddles, less alarming for their sleaze than for their cunning refinement, embellished by the country’s exquisite sense of design, softened by the ease of Buddhism, invigorated by the culture of sanuk (a good time). In Manila, girls tried to sell themselves out of sheer desperation; in Bangkok, the crystal palaces of sex were only extra adornments in a bejeweled city that already glittered with ambiguities.

  In Bangkok, moreover, the ambivalence of the girls only intensified the ambiguity of the bars. For no gaze was direct, and no smile clear-cut in the city of mirrors. And the mirrors were everywhere: one-way mirrors walling the massage parlors, mirrors lining the ceilings of the “curtain hotels,” mirrors shimmering in the bars, pocket mirrors in which each girl converted herself into a reflection of her admirer’s wishes. Look into a bar girl’s eyes, and you’d see nothing but the image of your own needs; ask her what she wanted, and she’d flash back a transparent “up to you.” Everything here was in the eye of the beholder; everything was just a trick of the light.

  Even language in this scene began in time to resemble a dance of a thousand veils. The girls referred to themselves always as “ladies” and talked of their beaus as “boyfriends,” though many, in sad fact, were hardly boys and seldom friends. If they wanted money, the ladies asked their boyfriends, not to “pay,” but just to “help” them. And if ever a man gave his coy mistress a compliment—if ever he told her that her eyes smiled or her smile had secrets in it—she would brush him off, with a mixture of sadness and skepticism, and dub him a “sweet mouth.” Yet in her very next breath, she would gaily assure him that she had a “good heart,” and so did he.

  In the netherworld of Bangkok, then, nothing was sure, nothing secure. Names changed, relations shifted, people and places evaporated. All certainties were dissolved in the soft city of hard questions; it was easy to say what it wasn’t, difficult to know what it was. Bangkok was a riddler who declared, in all candor, “I am a liar.”

  One girl in the bars told me she was twenty-five, though she was really twenty-nine and was born, in truth, thirty-one years ago. She could not speak English, she told me in faultless English. “How old are you?” I asked a girl who was new to the scene. “She,” interjected another, “she only twenty-one.” “No,” said the first. “Twenty-three.” “But two days ago,” I protested, “you said nineteen.” And two days ago she had also told me that she did not like this job, that she was unhappy amid the city’s bluff
and bluster, that she missed her family in Chiangmai. Now she was clapping and dancing as enthusiastically as all the others.

  I asked three dancers the time, and none of their answers matched. I heard one girl say she had worked in the business for fifteen days. No, two years. In actual fact, a year. I looked for a girl called Noy and was told by her best friend, Ead, that Noy was a false name based on a nickname, and her surname had changed anyway now that she was married. I went back to the bar where I had met her, to find the place gone, and all the people changed. And some of the girls here looked like boys, and the most impossibly feminine of all—long of leg and husky of voice—were not girls at all. Janjira’s hair in her photos was sometimes red, sometimes long, sometimes curly, sometimes black, sometimes short, sometimes brown, sometimes straight. “Who is that boy in all the pictures?” “My brother.”

  VII

  Bangkok’s intricate blend of dynamism and languor had long intrigued me. But as I spent more time in the country, Thailand began to betray other combinations I found more difficult to square. For savagery and grace were so cunningly interwoven here that beauty often seemed brutal and brutality itself quite beautiful. At official performances of Thai classical dance, sketches that featured lissome girls making supple turns were juxtaposed with others that showed off bruising, but no less sinuous, displays of sword fighting. Meanwhile, bouts of Thai boxing resembled nothing so much as ritualized ballets, in which two agile boys bowed their heads before the spirit of the ring, then pounded each other to the accompaniment of weird pipes, ominous drums and a steady chanting.